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My seven-year-old
daughter (Italian mother, British father) declared, in English: “Mamma,
I’m 100% Italian …” – Ah, light of my eyes – “… and I’m 100% English”. Oh. For
a fraction of a second I almost started: “You can’t be 200% …”. But she’s
right. Percentages are wrong, wrong as a way to talk about individual and
collective identities. My daughter doesn’t feel like a split being, Italian
when she likes pasta and English when it is Marmite: so that they may decide
when you, individual or country, can stay or must go. She is wholly, completely
Italian, completely English, and completely many other things too. If
percentages can’t deal with that, they are wrong, not her.

We need, like my
daughter, to start rebelling against the monodimensional models of identity we
are asked to conform to, whose consequences we live with. Think for instance of
the identity question in the Eurobarometer survey. This periodic EU-wide survey asks people
to choose: are you national or European? The option to be both is there,
yet the alternatives are in a clearly hierarchical line: “Do you identify as
national only, national and European, European and national, European only?” As
well as the hierarchy, this deceptively simple menu pretends each option stands
alone when clearly the real meaning lies in the reciprocal relationship with
the others. Ultimately, whilst appearing to welcome plurality, the set options
imply that ‘identities’ are pitched one against the other, in a model that
clearly assumes a 100%, so anything but an exclusive identity conveys a split
identity and a lesser one. It is no surprise with such a model of identity that
only 2% across the EU choose ‘European only’. Questions of identity always
presuppose a model of identity, and the answers can only reinforce it.

This was never a vote
about the economy only. The result is now interpreted as a ‘protest’ vote, as a
sign of deep disenfranchisement and malaise, which it clearly is, too. But it’s
not the answers that are stupid; it was always the question, the implied
identity question.

Bad questions produce
frustration and get protest answers. Perhaps some of the youth absenteeism was
also due to the absurdity of this choice for people whose memories are all in
this century, when effectively being British and European go hand in hand, when
you have always been 100% British and 100% European. We need to find new ways
to recognise and enable the many, sometimes contradictory but nevertheless
vital dimensions that make us up. We are 100% economic beings, and 100%
non-economic too.